Category Archives: Features

Food News: A Wackjob Farm Bill to Eat More From Your Wallet

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So we’ve got this drought in the Midwest and its attendant spiked food prices forecast for the next three years.  We’ve got the existing farm bill scheduled to croak on September 30th.

And we’ve got two new farm bills in Congress waiting to entrench our problems.

The drought is assuredly caused in part by global warming, just as last weekend’s tornadoes in Queens and Brooklyn were, just as all of the wackjob weather we’ve seen for the past few years has been, just as the wackjob weather surely to come will be.

And rather than work to protect our national food supply by making it less vulnerable to climate change, both the Republican and Democratic farm bills make our meals more vulnerable.  They also accelerate the threat.

The United States sends billions of public dollars to the growers of a few high-impact crops (corn!) through elaborate, Byzantine subsidies.  Those crops—and more specifically the unceasing monocropping that sucks ever more nutrients out of the soil without putting any back—kills soil.  Crop rotation can fix that problem, but our massive industrial agricultural machine doesn’t allow time for that.  Instead, we use astonishingly large amounts of fossil fuel-based fertilizers each year (which accelerates climate change and whose use kills the microorganisms that make soil vital) and continue to monocrop corn and a few other grains (which means a single weather trend or a single pest can wipe out entire agricultural regions, as we’re seeing in this parched summer). Continue reading →

Garlic Green Bean: My Madeleine

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It took an energetic campaign to get Jason and our friend John to submit to the Panda Buffet in New London, Connecticut. On the drive back to NYC from a friend’s wedding, we had just passed through Rhode Island without glimpsing a single viable dining option (State motto: “Taco Bell? Fat chance!”), and I was quickly moving through the nausea-and-headache stage of hunger to one of open weeping, when we spied the Panda Buffet tucked unobtrusively next to a mattress store. After some pleading on my part, I was perusing all five of its bizarre food bars in a kind of transported bliss. Even though I would have settled for anything above a Pet Smart at that point, I was secretly delighted that we ended up at a Chinese buffet. Salvation, thy name is fortune cookie.

I understand that a buffet is not most people’s idea of paradise. Dwell on the all-you-can-eat concept for too long, and it will seem a little grotesque to even the most expansive eaters. It should come as no surprise that it was a 1940s American hotelier, Herb MacDonald, who took the little Swedish sideboard of cold fish known as the smorgasbord and raised it to the gargantuan, fixed-price spectacle we know today.  Who among us hasn’t fallen for its gluttonously seductive charms? Once, as a child, I ate so much at a buffet that I got sick at my aunt’s house later, and I can still remember the panicky look on her face when I woke her in the middle of the night, a look that said, “Good lord, my sister’s youngest child has killed herself with crab legs.”

But I maintain that my main attraction to the All-You-Can-Eat buffet has less to do with sheer quantity and more to do with the spectrum of choice. Continue reading →

Mac and Cheese, Naked Women, and the Offense That is Ketchup at the West Indian Day Parade

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The West Indian Day parade rules every Labor Day in our part of Brooklyn.  It’s the American version of Carnival.  No where else will you see Chuck Schumer plodding down Eastern Parkway followed by a tractor trailer loaded with twenty 56-inch speakers, a brass band, a DJ, and 15 half-naked women rapturously grinding like bikinied peacocks in the headdresses of a golden Aztec god.  These women always make me ashamed of my own stomach muscles.

This parade is stupendous in part because politicians seeking reelection are seemingly required to be there.  Who knew the descendents of Carribian slaves carried so much clout.  Hillary Clinton was a staple for her years up here.  This year, Governor Andrew Cuomo was the most shocking manifestation of a Ken doll that I’ve ever seen.  He gave a kid in front of me the point-wink-thumbs-up triple play.

 

 

Shannon is a parade person.  We’ve decided that such a category of person exists, that she is one, and that I am not.  I come for the costumes, to be reminded of countries I had forgotten existed, and to see so many people so happy.

And the food.  This is a food blog.

Curried goat, ox, fish.  Fried breadfruit and rice & peas.  Ackee fish and fish cakes and oxtail.  Grilled corn with its silk singed black and covered in butter, salt, and chili.  Sorrel sugar drink that tastes like root beer.  Collards and fried shrimp.  Young men trolling the crowds and hawking little six-ounce bottles of booze juice in all the shades of a pack of Lifesavers. Continue reading →

What Will Oscar Eat?: The Slayer Strikes Again

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crossword cat

The slayer at rest: "What tomato? I was just doing this crossword..."

I suppose we had become complacent. Long weeks had passed since we experienced any incidents of my cat Oscar snagging tomatoes from the upper shelves in our kitchen in the middle of the night and slaughtering them in what, judging from the aftermath, was similar to a scene out of Kill Bill. So when a wealth of juicy tomatoes started rolling in from our backyard and from our CSA, we were less than diligent about hiding them. And, once again displaying a curiously gourmet sensibility, the smell of all those heirlooms and beefsteaks became too much for him.

violated tomatoWe had long ago given Oscar the middle name Tomato Slayer, but even so, it was a little disturbing to find a thoroughly violated tomato in a bowl of vegetables last Sunday morning. What was strange was that this occurrence went against his usual MO of knocking the tomato to the floor and having his way with it, thus eliminating any possibility that he was really just using it as a toy and not eating it. This time he had simply sunk his teeth into it, chewed out a big hole and lapped up all the juice and seeds. If I looked closely, I could still see the fang marks, and the thought of him perched above the bowl like some fat furry succubus, red liquid dripping from his chin, made me shudder. Continue reading →

Picking Apart Picky Eating

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incredible, edible

The most reviled ad campaign of my childhood

“I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor,” Julia Child said. It was no grotesque vermin that prompted this declaration, no poisonous bit of flora. It was cilantro, an ingredient that many foodies would eat by the fistful.

She’s hardly alone. It’s rare to find someone who really and truly enjoys eating everything. My father winces at the sight of asparagus, my boss gags on any tomato sauce that is too sweet, my friend Dave turns pale at the thought of white substances located anywhere along the mayonnaise/sour cream/Alfredo sauce continuum. What’s more, I’d be hard-pressed to name the favorite dish of any of these people. The items that repulse them are just weirder and more interesting.

But where do these strange food hatreds come from? Is it cultural? Physiological? Psychological? There’s a whole field of psychological research behind the notion of conditioned food aversions (also called Sauce-Bearnaise Syndrome). One nasty encounter with a food, and our minds can turn us against it for years to come. The theory is based on the idea that our foraging ancestors had to learn to stay away from noxious berries and such, but anyone who ever did too many shots of Jägermeister will be intimately familiar with the basic concept. The thing is, many foods become guilty merely by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was hardly the fault of that can of red cream soda that I drank it right before I got a bad case of the stomach flu when I was eight years old, but it was many years before I could drink any of its brethren.

But the conditioned response explanation seems to me, at best, incomplete. Continue reading →

Name that Kitchen Gadget!

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In scouring the Internet for this Friday’s pop quiz, I found an OK Cupid page devoted to “singles interested in obscure kitchen gadgets.” Believe me, they covered quite a spectrum, these singles, from a chipper looking New Zealander making a peace sign at the camera to a scowling woman from Tempe whose eye shadow was almost as impressive as her cleavage.

At any rate, gadgets clearly have wide appeal and since we had fun a few weeks ago with our historic utensil puzzle, we thought we’d let our readers test their wits with some more modern marvels. If you can identify all nine of the items below, you should start your own culinary school…or at least troll for some new admirers on OK Cupid.

gadget 1gadget 2gadget 3gadget 4gadget 5

gadget 6

gadget 7gadget 8gadget 9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t follow this link until you’re ready to see the answers! Continue reading →

How to Feed (and Shvitz) a Cold

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Banya

This is from the Brooklyn Banya website. Full disclosure: most of the women in bikinis I saw were not wearing hats.

I tightened my towel and slithered along the wall, trying not to interfere in the conversation between the proprietor of the Brooklyn Banya and another man (which was perhaps a friendly disagreement or perhaps just shy of coming to blows—it was hard to say), but before I could inch out of sight, the owner grinned at me happily, pumped his fist in the air and said, “Yaaaah! Americaaaan!” I took this as some sort of ebullient welcome to his house of Russian-ness, so I sniffled and weakly raised my fist in return.

A summer cold is an insidious affliction, sneaking up on you with its chills and fevers while everyone else is still frolicking happily in the sunshine. And so when one hit me this past weekend, I decided to fight fire with fire—I was going to sweat the thing out of me.

It’s true that, at least for most people, the main attraction at the banya on Coney Island Avenue is not the food, but I had sound reasons for considering this a PitchKnives excursion. For one, even the non-edible portions of a bath house have a hint of the culinary. Where else can you simulate the experience of baking yourself (dry sauna), parboiling yourself (steam room) or poaching yourself inside a eucalyptus leaf (wet sauna)? But more importantly, I figured that any people who included Siberia within their borders would boast some powerful cold-battling vittles. Continue reading →

Yo, Did You Know That Monticello Has a Sweet Garden as Part of Its Deeply Ambivalent Legacy?

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Monticello is the Virginia plantation that Thomas Jefferson spent 41 years building and the home to which he brought all of the inventions of clever common sense he found in Europe or Antiquity’s texts: a machine that duplicates with one pen on a piece of paper the motion of the pen worked by a human hand on another; a Lazy Susan for books; a clock to hang in a continent of folks who’d never seen one.  He invented a plow and designed into the house components so simple as to be plucked from the seed of artfulness just before passing the threshold of “invention”: a weather vane on the roof attached to swing a compass on the ceiling of  the vestibule; the weights that turned the clock unspooling up the wall along a seven-day calender, telling the time.

Jefferson imagined an America of gentlemen farmers.  He himself was a farmer, would have been a gardener were it not for the free labor of 200-odd slaves whom the museum now refers to as “enslaved workers.”  I like how it shifts the emphasis.

Jefferson considered the introduction of horticultural wonders a responsibility.  His slaves cut his vegetable garden out of the side of the mountain with hand tools.  They created a small bluff over sloping fields he would try unsuccessfully forever to turn into a vineyard.  The garden was dinner, botanist’s experiment, and showpiece.  It included a pavilion with a pyramidal roof and a reading bench.

The garden is kind of awesome. Continue reading →

Reminder: Send Us Your Best Summer Cocktail!

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cocktailsTemperatures are once again rising like a flock of seagulls on the wing. It’s important to hydrate…and why not throw in a little gin while you’re at it? We’re calling on all you gifted mixologists out there to cool our sweaty brows.

Send your signature summer cocktail recipes to submission@pitchknives.com. We’ll try the ones we like best and rate them according to taste, creativity and capacity to refresh.

It’s only right that the winners receive a token of our gratitude. What will it be? An artful swizzle stick? A crocheted beer coozie? A hand-mixed glass of Shannon’s signature cocktail, the Bee’s Knees? You’ll just have to win to find out.

Entries are due this Saturday, August 11. So get to it! Shake, stir, and please, please chill. The address for entries is, one more time, submissions@pitchknives.com.

Community News: Drought for Dinner

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The U.S. lays claim to over half of the globe’s corn exports and nearly the same for soybeans.  Nobody else comes close.  China, runner-up in the corn category, exports less than half the amount America does.  The same is the case for Brazil when it comes to the soy market.

The majority of each ends up as feed for livestock raised abroad, and additional bazillions of tons of corn and soy beyond our exports go toward the domestic production of meat that we export (it takes roughly 10 lbs of grain to grow 1 lb of meat).  All told, we shipped $53 billion dollars worth of all three—corn, soy, and meat—in 2011.

But global warming has made 2012 the hottest year since we began keeping records in 1895.  A third of the country’s counties have been declared federal disaster areas on account of drought.  Crops across the Midwest (88% and 87% of the country’s corn and soy supply, respectively) have been burned brittle and brown.  That’s driven corn prices up 45% since mid-June and soybean prices nearly 30% since the beginning of that month and nearly 60% since the end of last year. Continue reading →